George Monbiot

George Monbiot is "Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. Monbiot is author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He is active in the ecology movement and helped to found the land rights campaign 'The Land is Ours'. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper and is a ZNet Commentator.

Writing for Monthly Review Zine in 2008, Patrick Bond observed that: "Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George Monbiot..." By way of a contrast, Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster, wrote the year before that in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning Monbiot had "gotten into the act" of proposing solutions "shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box." Foster continues: "Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the problem."

Affiliations

 * Former National Council Member, Catalyst (think tank)
 * Member of the The Real News: International Founding Committee
 * Journalist Advisory Committee, The Real News

Critical Articles

 * Colin Barker, "George Monbiot has misrepresented Marx's Communist Manifesto", SocialistWorker, August 23, 2003.
 * Colin Barker, "Don't blame Marx for capitalism", SocialistWorker, August 30, 2003.
 * Colin Barker, "Marx was one hundred percent democratic", SocialistWorker, September 6, 2003.
 * Roy Wilkes, "Leaving us to pay the price; Review: George Monbiot, Heat, published by Allen Lane, 2006", Socialist Outlook : SO/11 - Spring 2007.
 * John Bellamy Foster, "A New War on the Planet?", MRZine, June 6, 2007.
 * Kim Kaos, "Monbiot betrays his class bias", Kim Kaos, September 3, 2008.
 * Michael Barker, "George Monbiot And The Persistence Of The Population Myth", Swans Commentary, November 2, 2009.

Medialens Exchanges

 * Medialens, "George Monbiot Responds on Iraq and "Just War"", December 2, 2002.
 * Medialens, "George Monbiot Responds Again on Iraq and "Just War"", December 7, 2002.
 * Medialens, "Final Exchange With George Monbiot On The Guardian And The Propaganda Model", December 10, 2002.
 * Medialens, "Centres of Power: George Monbiot Queries Media Lens - Part 1", October 27, 2003.
 * Medialens, "George Monbiot Queries Media Lens - Part 2", October 28, 2003.
 * Medialens, "Biting The Hand That Feeds - Part One: Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot, Media Lens, The New Statesman And Newsnight", June 25, 2003.
 * Medialens, "Can this be true? George Monbiot challenges media lens on hypocrisy", December 5, 2008.
 * Medialens, "The Guardian, climate and advertising - an open email to George Monbiot", June 15, 2009.
 * Medialens, "Hired Hands - Part 1: Iran, Obama, Gaza, And MPs' Expenses", July 7, 2009.
 * David Edwards and David Cromwell, Newspeak in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009).

Liberal/Conservative Criticisms
A champion of not owning cars, Monbiot actually owns a car. He once described the pro-car lobby as “antisocial bastards” and has blamed cars for ruining children’s lives. “Our children are growing upsocially stunted: instead of playing together they are playing alone on their computers, in part because the only available public spaces have gone.”

Monbiot drives a Renault Clio, not the most frugal in fuel consumption or carbon emissions. He bought it from a friend for an undisclosed amount. It emits 115g/km, 10% higher than a Toyota Prius, the petrol-electric hybrid beloved of the green movement. "I’ve had to break a long-time commitment," he explained, "but the only way to get by, we decided, was to have the occasional use of a car.”

In his latest book, 'Heat', Monbiot worked out that the coach was the greenest form of travel, in terms of CO2 emissions per person per kilometre. But does Monbiot use it? No. “Coach travel would be slightly better [than the train] but I will be damned if I’m going round the country in the current system,” he says. “If you’ve got loads of time and very little money -- if you’re unemployed, say -- the coach is the way to go. But if you need to get anywhere that day, it’s unusable."

Monbiot admits to being “a terrible boy racer” in his youth, tearing up country roads in his first car, a Renault 8. “I should have been banned,” he says. “I didn’t have enough sense at the wheel.” Now Monbiot has begun campaigning to have speed cameras installed in Machynlleth in west Wales where he lives, citing “problems with boy racers”. 

Monbiot has stated that air travel is unacceptable. "Global warming means that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse," he wrote in a 1999 article. Yet he himself traveled an undisclosed amount of transatlantic air miles to promote his book "Heat - How to stop the planet burning," a book which highlights the unacceptability of transatlantic travel. Monbiot also believes that self-enforced abstinence is a waste of time: “Why bother installing an energy-efficient lightbulb when a man in Lanarkshire boasts of attaching 1.2 million Christmas lights to his house?”

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Living Marxism
 * parecon

External resources

 * Monbiot.com official site
 * Wikipedia - George Monbiot encyclopedia entry
 * Open Directory Project - George Monbiot directory category
 * Yahoo! - George Monbiot directory category

By George Monbiot

 * Guardian Unlimited column with full archives.
 * "The Revolution Has Been Televised", The Guardian, December 18, 1997.
 * "Far Left of Far Right?", Prospect Magazine, November 1998.
 * America Is a Religion. US Leaders Now See Themselves as Priests of a Divine Mission to Rid the World of Its Demons, Guardian/UK, July 28, 2003.
 * Post-9/11 America Is a Religion, Alternet, July 30, 2003.
 * "Invasion of the Entryists", The Guardian, December 9, 2003.
 * (with Michael Albert) Movement Building 2004: What Do We Want? An Exchange Between Michael Albert and George Monbiot. On the Occurrence of the Publication of their new books: Albert: "Parecon: Life After Capitalism" and Monbiot: "The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order".
 * "Paid-up members", The Guardian, March 1, 2005.
 * George Monbiot, "A kneejerk rejection of nuclear power is not an option", Guardian, February 20, 2009.

Other articles & commentary

 * Vince Caughley, Talking about a global democratic revolution, Socialist Worker, August 8, 2003: "George Monbiot, the prominent British journalist, caused a splash with his recent visit to Australia. ... His call for a global democratic revolution to address the enormous inequalities in our world really struck a chord. The people who packed out his meetings were keen to engage in the debate about how to bring about such a transformation."
 * "Interview with Monbiot on the LM group," LobbyWatch.org, April 11, 2007.